Madam Speaker, my colleague's question as to whether this is a deliberate policy direction that the government has taken or whether this is sheerly by neglect is one that bears examining. I would argue that in many cases it comes down to a political direction that the government has taken, although it may be a combination of both.
The government has targeted putting in infrastructure, putting in the effort and putting in the political goodwill that it feels it has to invest in order to get re-elected.
The Liberal government reminds me a little bit of Elizabethans and sex. It claims to loathe it and protest against it but it secretly lusts for it and cannot live without it. The Liberals have made this a political issue. Instead of targeting rural Canada and saying that they need to put in the time, effort, money and infrastructure and come up with long term plans to help Canadians live and exist in communities like the hon. members and my own, they have targeted cities. They have targeted building up the areas of the country where they already hold the political power and the political base.
The Liberal vision that the hon. parliamentary secretary spoke about was the Liberal vision not the Canadian vision. Canadians are not looking to this government for inspiration or direction.
Another issue, which has not been touched on yet, is rural health care. Rural health care is a huge problem for Canadians. It impacts in a very direct and real way on the ability of Canadians to access quality health care. Do members know that 99.8% of Canada's 10 million square kilometres are rural by area and yet 31.4% of the population or roughly 9 million people live in predominantly rural areas? Towns under 10,000 account for 22% of the population and yet they are only served by 10% of the physicians. Canada's larger rural and regional centres of 10,000 to 100,000 constitute 15.9% of the population and have only 11% of the physicians.
Recruitment, retention of physicians, the ability for people living in rural Canada to access the most rudimentary medical services is waning and is in real jeopardy. In places like Canso and Guysborough they do not have the ability to get proper medical care. If it is more complicated, such as needing surgery or X-rays, they are forced to travel extensive distances. Thank goodness for the able paramedics who act as stopgaps for the fact that we are seeing many services in terms of medical procedures being done only in the urban centres. That is a huge problem for rural Canada.
I touched on the firearms registry and my colleague from Yorkton--Melville spoke at length about this issue. We talk about the priority of Canadians, particularly around policing in rural Canada, which is another big challenge because of the size of regions they have to patrol and the ability to get around to all the corners of large rural areas. Let us consider the billions of dollars being wasted by the government, with the firearms registry perhaps being the most prime example. Others that come quickly to mind were the cancellation of contracts such as Pearson and helicopters where there was no return. It was money burned. It was like driving down the Trans-Canada Highway, rolling down the window and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars out the window. That is what happened, only in that instance rural Canadians may have been able to pick it up on the side of the road. In this case it was thrown into a furnace.
We saw what happened during the HRDC scandal and the way in which that money was being funnelled into the hands of good supportive Liberals. We see it in Prince Edward Island today where the president of the Liberal Party for the island is getting hundreds of contracts and millions of dollars because of his loyalty.
That type of patronage is absolutely offensive to many Canadians. That leads to the cynicism and apathy that we are seeing in politics. Canadians are staying away in droves, which is of great benefit to the party in power because the lower the voter turnout, the lower the numbers that come out. It is the loyal Liberals who come out and vote. They win ridings with 38%. The hon. member opposite knows. He is good at it. He spreads the money around in his riding.
Rural Canada is not a priority for the government. It has not been and will not be until the voice is heard, until there is a feeling that there will be a political cost for ignoring this part of the country, for ignoring regions such as the west and the farmers with severe problems either due to drought or flooding. Members will recall the Prime Minister's visit out west in 1997. He went there and threw a couple of sandbags around. Then he headed back to Ottawa, pulled the plug and called the election. That was opportunism.
Politically motivated, corrupt and patronage is what Canadians are saying. The Prime Minister likes to brag because he has never had ministers resign. That is because he shuffles them off months later into obscurity or sends them off to a diplomatic post. Talk about corrupt. There was a good likelihood that there was going to be an RCMP investigation into the matter involving Alfonso Gagliano and all of a sudden he is representing Canada abroad in Denmark. What did the Danes do to deserve that?
That is the type of image Canadians are getting now of the government. That is the type of lasting impression and the legacy that the Prime Minister may be searching for so desperately as he reaches the end of his tenure and as the dogs around him start to close in. That is the image that Canada will have of the Prime Minister, particularly in rural parts of the country where people are suffering immensely, where students are burdened with a debt the size of a mortgage by the time they finish university or leave school to pursue a career. These are Canadians who are looking at the country and the government with a very jaded eye.
When we have these types of debates and talk about the challenges we must talk about how to be more productive. We must talk about sharing the wealth. We talk about getting money back into the hands of Canadians through incentives. We talk about getting companies to locate in rural parts of the country instead of always funneling them into the golden triangle here in Ontario. That is fine if we want to be a completely split rural-urban country.
It is ironic that we have two competing task forces, a rural task force and an urban task force. The parliamentary secretary talks about his vision for Canada and yet it has been divided up. The government has given the task forces little projects to go off and work on at separate times instead of having a national strategy or coming forward with real ideas that will allow Canadians to go back to work and be productive, to keep some of their hard earned money, to face the challenges in health care and education and to look at ways in which we can grow industries in rural Canada because the geographic challenges that used to exist are no longer there.
Technology allows Canadians to access health care via the Internet in certain instances. It allows them to participate from a rural location in the high tech industry. It allows rural Canada to benefit from greater use of natural resources like natural gas off the coast of Nova Scotia. It allows farmers to use greater technology in the implementation of their activities and access to markets. The government is an abysmal failure in terms of its response to the needs of rural Canada. It can talk all it likes and bring forward some miniscule examples but its record over time is the true test.
When Canadians ask themselves the basic, fundamental questions of whether their quality of life has improved, whether they see the Liberal government being responsible for helping them get ahead, for making sure their children have a brighter future and can live and grow, and continue to keep family and rural traditions in the country alive, do they look to the government with any sense of hope or optimism? Sadly not.
When the rhetorical question is asked from the opposite side: how will this change? There is only one way it will change and that is when the government is defeated and there is a government that is sensitive, open to ideas and prepared to act on behalf of rural Canada.